In the 1980 Boston Marathon, a woman named Rosie Ruiz hopped out of the crowd at the 25th mile of the race and sprinted to the finish line to claim victory. On the 25th anniversary of Ruiz's hoax, ESPN's Aaron Kuriloff explains why it will never happen again. The changes in how the Boston Marathon is administered offers us a nice case study at the nexus of three social-political mechanisms of domination: Foucault's discipline, Deleuze's control, and Debord's spectacle.

Still, Ruiz has left an indelible imprint on Boston and other marathons around the world, race officials said. From computer chips imbedded in runners' shoes to a network of digital video cameras tracking the race, Ruiz's legacy is a near foolproof monitoring system that allows officials to track every one of the tens of thousands of runners in the race. It's a boon to organizers and a benefit to spectators, who can follow their friends' progress on computer screens around the world. It's a system increasingly standard to road races around the world.

"There's two obvious things different today," said Dave McGillivrey, race director for the Boston Marathon. "One is certainly technology, in the form of chip systems and the way we're able to track runners along the course and know at all times who's in the lead and what their splits are. And No. 2, there's now TV vehicles right out in front. … If someone jumped in front of the TV truck, it's going to get noticed."

In the early days of the 109-year-old race, officials relied on volunteers to track the runners' progress along the 26.2-mile course from Hopkinton to Boston. The technology used was no more complex than a notebook and a ballpoint pen. "When runners went by a checkpoint, volunteers wrote down their bib number and their time," said Jack Fleming, a spokesman for the race. Those volunteers worked in pairs and brought their notebooks back to a central point for analysis. "At the end of the day, you could put the pieces back together again — see that No. 10 was in 10th place at five miles, fifth place at 10 miles, and so on."

. . .

It wasn't that the checkpoint system didn't work. In fact, race organizers used data from the checkpoints to confirm eyewitness reports that Ruiz had cheated. It's just that the system didn't work in time to prevent Ruiz from scamming her way onto the podium. "After that, everyone stepped back and said 'We need to go a lot deeper,' " Fleming said.

Adding prize money to the mix, as organizers did in the 1986 race, increased the need to ensure the marathon's integrity. Organizers increased the number of checkpoints to 14, and added video surveillance along the route. The addition of live broadcasts of both men's and women's races also reduced the possibility of a cheater jumping in at the last minute. Drug testing became increasingly prevalent, and the corporate sponsor who provided the cash purse also gave money for crowd control.

. . .

But the most dramatic change came in 1996, when organizers began supplying each runner with a small computer chip. According to several manufacturers, these chips are encased in tiny, nearly weightless plastic packages that lace into the runners' shoes or attach to their bibs. When a competitor crosses a mat placed on the tarmac at each of the marathon's checkpoints, the mat reads information from the chip and transmits it to a computer.

. . .

A race the size of the Boston Marathon requires 11 different chip systems, supplied by independent contractors, in order to provide chips for all runners. It also requires a computer hub staffed by networking specialists from Hewlett-Packard, a sponsor.

The final big advance arrived this year, in the form of digital cameras synchronized with the computer chip. As runners trigger the mats on the course, the cameras follow their movements. This allows organizers to verify that chips are, in fact, being worn by the correct runners. It also allows the company supplying the cameras to extract 15 to 20 seconds worth of footage from each checkpoint and sell runners personalized DVDs of their own highlights.

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Bentham's panopticon, found in so much prison architecture, is now little more than alibi for the illusion that whatever may pass for public or private space is not a panoptic architecture.

Critical Art Ensemble

sportsBabel

sportsBabel examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of sport and physical culture, weaving between materiality, information, intuition and intellect. The notes posted here should be understood as emerging from an ongoing program of research-creation.

Threads of inquiry include: the security-entertainment complex and the militarization of sport; mediated sport as a spectrum of interactive possibility; the experiential qualities of postmodern sporting spaces; the cyborg body athletic manifest as mobile social subject; and the potential politics of a sporting multitude.

sportsBabel is produced by Sean Smith, an artist, writer and athlete living in Toronto, Canada. He holds a PhD in Media Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Switzerland and has exhibited and performed internationally as part of the Department of Biological Flow, an experimental collaboration in arts-based research inquiry with Barbara Fornssler. He was the inaugural Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Western Ontario in 2011-12, a participant at the Wood Land School – The Exiles residency in 2013, and one of the curators of Channel Surf, a 200km canoe journey and open platform for the arts that was one of 5 projects worldwide accepted to Project Anywhere in 2015.

He is currently adjunct faculty in wearable sculpture at OCAD University, a sessional lecturer on cartographies of the control society at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and one of the founding members of the Murmur Land Studios curatorial collective -- an experimental field school initiative begun in 2017 that offers event-based pedagogy in art, philosophy, kinaesthetics, ecology and camping community for the post-anthropocene era.

Sean's poetic work has appeared in Brave New Word, One Imperative, a glimpse of, Inflexions, the sexxxpo pwoermds anthology and the Why Hasn't JB Already Disappeared tribute anthology to Jean Baudrillard. He has performed poetic-philosophy work at Babel, Tuning Speculation, the Blackwood Gallery's Running with Concepts conference, and the Art in the Public Sphere speakers series at the University of Western Ontario's Department of Visual Arts. His first full manuscript, Overclock O'Clock, was published by Void Front Press in 2017, while three other chapbooks, tununurbununulence vOo.rtex, Verbraidids, and Syncopation Studies have been released in the past year.

sportsBabel was the basis for the Global Village Basketball project (2009-2011), which was an unfunded 24-hour basketball event that attempted to network together various pickup games from around the world into one meta-game; at its peak, players from 9 different countries joined the game to collectively score over 2,000 baskets in a meta Red vs. Blue contest. His other sports-art work has been presented in such varied spaces as HomeShop in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, the Main Squared community arts festival in Toronto, SenseLab's Generating the Impossible research-creation event in Montreal, and in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art during Nuit Blanche.

His latest project, Aqua Rara, weaves a practice of embodied art-philosophistry together with athletics and kairotic time to work as a performance-text between myriad water ecologies, swimming gestures, and watching the Aquarium Channel endlessly on loop.

department of biological flow

The Department of Biological Flow is a project of research-creation by Sean Smith and Barbara Fornssler exploring the concept of the moving human body as it is integrated with broader information networks of signal and noise.

The reference is from George Lucas' epic 1971 movie, THX 1138, in which a state-controlled intensification of communication processes manages every facet of daily life in a futuristic society, regulating the flux of all human subjects in work, leisure and love.

Though the Department exists in homage to Lucas’ vision, our consideration of biological flow seeks to reinvigorate the agency of the (in)human subject in its negotiations with economic and political structures both material and immaterial.